Life's Too Short Season One, Episode Five Recap: Gulliver’s Travails

To give credit where it’s due, at least there was no forced appearance of Ricky Gervais or some random celebrity this week on Life’s Too Short. Unfortunately, that didn’t improve the quality of the episode. In dissecting the absurdity of religion, the show found nothing fresh to say, and the potential for a romance was destroyed by a clichéd pulling-down-a-tablecloth pratfall.

In attempting to deal with his divorce, Warrick Davis visits a “psychic housekeeper”—a fraud who ineptly struggles to deliver platitudes and fake messages from the dead. He visits a Catholic priest and harps on the history of pedophilia. He visits a Scientologist and tries to get him to admit it’s just a cult. None of these portrayals and accusations is new to the famously atheistic Gervais. In fact, they each notably miss the opportunity to dive deeper into the problem of people seeking spiritual solace in faith-based organizations and having those organizations fail them. It’s funny, or at least compelling, when the system fails those who believe in it…not those who expect it to.

With the spiritual letdown behind him, Davis searches for physical solace instead. After striking out miserably at a club, he returns to the dating service that set him up with his ex-wife and gets sent on a blind date with another dwarf. Davis is predictably horrified that people would assume that he couldn’t be dating a “normal-sized” knockout, and ends up ruining what could have been the sweet relationship that Life’s Too Short desperately needs. The woman managed to see Davis’s charm beyond his ego and prattling nonsense, but he has a total of one heartfelt scene with her before destroying the potential.

The faux pas that Davis commits are unbelievable—not in a good way, where the audience is shocked (Did he really just insinuate his date has testicles? And hit on another woman in front of her?), but in a way where nothing he says is credibly built up and delivered. This is not Davis’s fault—as previously mentioned, it’s due to lazy writing that doesn’t try to create enough tension for the absurdity to come off as true. The audience finally was able to care about a storyline—Davis and his date—but it didn’t last long enough. The situation was underdeveloped…too short, if you will.